Born and raised in San Antonio, Pickett Porterfield is an aspiring writer and avid wanderer. He has lived in Mexico and traveled extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. For more tales from the travel trail, check out his previous blogs at Postcards Home.

Note: This is an mySA.com City Brights Blog. These blogs are not written or edited by mySA or the San Antonio Express-News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.

Venice of the East

BANGKOK—We’ve spent the better part of this past week checking out different areas of Bangkok in an effort to find an apartment or long term guesthouse. We like the hotel we’re in right now near the river in Banglamphu; we’ve stayed here several times in the past, and when you consider that we have a tidy room with private bathroom and hot shower, A/C, cable TV, daily maid service, and a private fourth-floor balcony overlooking the leafy monastery across the street, all for a little over $19 per night, it’s tempting to just stay put. But we hope to eventually find our own place with a little more room and perhaps a bit fewer tourists. So we’ve been quite busy wandering mile after mile in the sweaty heat trying to decide which part of town we like best.

In reality this is easier said than done, as Bangkok is not so much a city, by traditional definitions, as a vastly sprawling collection of disparate neighborhoods loosely connected by congested and randomly routed thoroughfares interwoven with thousands of labyrinthine alleyways called sois. Unlike most large cities, Bangkok does not possess a true city center, nor does it have the typical network of orderly grid-like roads radiating out from a central downtown area. High-rise buildings and skyscrapers—some in tight clusters and others standing all alone—randomly stud the horizon, while roaring elevated expressways and gridlocked boulevards crisscross the cityscape with no apparent thought given to urban planning. Regardless of whether one chooses to perceive this as a drawback or as part of Bangkok’s offbeat charm, it’s largely due to the fact that, until the latter half the 19th Century, Bangkok had no roads.

A former river boat repurposed into stilt house on the banks of the Chao Praya River

At that time Bangkok was frequently referred to as the Venice of the East, a term coined by the first Western diplomats and traders to begin regularly visiting the city in the early 1800′s. Like Venice, it was a metropolis defined by water. Nestled along the banks of the Chao Praya river, the city was interlaced with hundreds of canals called khlongs—most excavated by hand by thousands of Cambodian prisoners and Chinese coolies—extending inland in concentric and intersecting patterns. Almost all of the city’s inhabitants lived either on houseboats tethered together and moored to the bank, or on teak stilt houses built out over the waters of the river and canals. Residing on land was a right granted only to nobles and a handful of prosperous families by edict of the king. Not counting a few elephant tracks and foot paths meandering through tropical foliage, everyone got around by boat and dugout canoe.

A few of Old Bangkok's ubiquitous stilt houses still remain

A number of books penned by visiting Victorian-era Europeans and Americans poetically extol the romantic allure of this lush and exotic waterborne city. Things today are a bit different, as most of the khlongs have long since been filled in and paved over to make roads, but quite a few still remain, though all but the largest are nowadays little more than fetid sewers running alongside streets and sois. But enough remains of this bygone watery world, especially amidst the ramshackle piers and bustling produce markets along the eastern bank of the Chao Praya, to lend the city a still-palpable riverine vibe. In order to understand how Bangkok arrived at it’s present state of being, however, it’s necessary to take a look back at its history.

A new high-rise going up in Bangkok's sleek Sukhumvit neighborhood

From its founding until the middle of the 19th Century, Bangkok was largely cut off from the outside world, conducting almost all of its trade, both commercial and cultural, with China. This all began to change with King Mongkut, Rama IV. Reigning from 1851 to 1868, he was the first Thai sovereign to embrace Western ideals, and was later immortalized by Anna Leonowens, the English governess to the Thai court whose revealing though factually dubious memoir was later adapted into the Rogers and Hammerstein musical and subsequent movie, The King and I. But more importantly, King Mongkut, together with the then-governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, signed the Bowring Treaty of 1855, ushering in British trade concessions and a host of other reforms. The Bowring Treaty marked the beginning of the end for “Old Bangkok,” as foreign citizens, along with their Western ideas and money, began pouring in by the boat load.

A typical street scene in Banglamphu, one of Bangkok's more traditional neighborhoods

Mongkut’s son, King Chulalongkorn, Rama V, reined from 1868 to 1910. He picked up where his father left off, transforming Bangkok during his long reign. A fluent English speaker, he was the first Thai monarch to visit Europe. He made two trips there, in 1897 and again in 1907, under the guise of visiting his sons studying in London, but purportedly more as a fact finding mission. Upon returning from these lengthy trips abroad, King Chulalongkorn embarked on an ambitious campaign to modernize Bangkok, partly through the construction of tree-lined Parisian boulevards and grand European styled buildings, but also by means of liberalizing Thai government and society. Despite all the changes wrought by his progressive, Western-leaning sensibilities, King Chulalongkorn is perhaps most revered for shrewdly playing off the colonial advances of the British and French against each other, thereby preserving Thailand’s sovereignty when all of her neighbors were succumbing to colonial rule.

Heartburn Central at a produce market along the Chao Praya River

Chulalongkorn’s son, King Prajadipok, Rama VII, was the last remaining absolute monarch on Earth when a bloodless coup wrested power from him in 1932. He grudgingly abdicated from his exile in London, at which point the reins were picked up by Field Marshal Phibul, a military dictator who dominated Thai politics from 1933 to 1957. To placate royalist factions the Phibul government placed the ten year-old grandson of Rama V on the throne as a constitutional monarch, restoring the Chakri dynasty. In 1939 Phibul officially changed the country’s traditional name of Siam to Thailand. Since the time of Phibul, Thailand has flip-flopped back and forth between successive governments representing military, civilian and royalist loyalties, through seventeen constitutions promulgated by eighteen coups.

A late afternoon siesta in an old canoe along a khlong in Banglamphu

And thus we arrive at Bangkok today. “Modern” Bangkok really began to take shape in the years after WWII and exploded in the 1960′s when American money and infrastructure, along with thousands of American servicemen, began pouring in during the Vietnam War. Thailand remained a staunch anti-Communist ally of the United States throughout the Vietnam era, and it was during this time that the landscape of Bangkok, along with its Old World soul, began to rapidly transform almost beyond recognition. The mad pace of construction and the race to modernity escalated further during the economic boom years of the 1980′s and 1990′s, when high-rise buildings shot up and mammoth elevated expressways cut large swaths through the city. The party took a hiatus for a few years following the Asian economic crisis of 1997, but things have long since rebounded and the dizzying pace of progress continues unabated today, as evidenced by the dozens of towering construction cranes that dot the horizon.

It’s tempting to lament the passing of Old Bangkok and disdain the miles of concrete and urban sprawl of the present day. But while much of the beauty and romance of the old Venice of the East no longer exists, something different and equally compelling does: namely the bewildering bipolarity of this modern day crossroads of East and West, and Old and New.

It’s really something to behold. One minute you’re standing at an intersection gridlocked with honking cars and buses, wading through a maze of cluttered street vendors’ carts when suddenly you duck into an alleyway and not fifty yards down the narrow lane you’re met with the soothing sounds of birds chirping in the mango trees as grinning old ladies leisurely hang laundry in the open windows of sagging, century-old teak houses perched on stilts.

The other day while walking down one of Bangkok’s busiest thoroughfares, choking on the fumes from stalled traffic and fending off the advances of pesky tuk-tuk drivers, we passed the V-8 Diner, complete with an American Graffiti motif, a Wurlitzer jukebox and a chrome-plated milkshake bar, while directly across the way a Mexican restaurant called Sunrise Tacos sported a margarita machine and a Thai waitress in plaited pigtails and a lacy, magenta colored Mexican fiesta dress.

It’s not at all unusual to walk past a dapper Indian hawker standing in front of a tiny tailor shop greeting every passerby with the same refrain in heavily accented English: “Hello, sir! Custom suit? Tailored blouse, madame?” Just yesterday, on a cluttered soi off Sam Sen Road, we puzzled over a row of public coin-operated laundry machines resting on the sidewalk in front of someone’s open-air living room window, hemmed in on one side by an ancient hardware store open to the curb and on the other by a tiny air-conditioned smart-phone boutique—all stainless steel and polished hardwood—seemingly decorated from an Ikea catalog.

The staggering number of closet-sized 7-Eleven convenience stores in Bangkok is enough to boggle the mind. Often placed on opposite sides of the same street or a few doors down from one another, there seems to be a 7-Eleven on just about every street corner of Bangkok. You can get a Nestle ice cream sandwich, a vacuum-sealed package of Japanese-style dried seaweed, an old-school eight-ounce glass bottle of Coke for thirty cents, or a not-so-fresh hotdog off the roller grill, but the best part has to be the arctic blast of A/C that hits you as you walk through the automatic sliding doors, always a welcome treat in this largely open-air city.

The throbbing rhythm of imported Korean pop music that pulses through the speakers of shops and market stalls is all but ubiquitous in Bangkok, so we were quite surprised the other evening to suddenly hear Freddy Fender crooning “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” over the stereo at a little bar down the street from our hotel where we sat at a plastic table on the sidewalk sipping beers and watching a wiry old man sell dried squid to passing locals from a rusty pushcart parked along the curb.

Just when you begin to fool yourself into thinking you’ve got a place figured out, something invariably smacks you in the face and awakens you to the fact that, despite the McDonald’s down the street or the classic country oldies on the neighborhood beer joint’s soundtrack, you’re still in a very foreign place. Bangkok may no longer be the Venice of the East, but in some ways it has morphed into something equally, if not more, intriguing.